Exhibitions 2
Maggi Hambling: A Matter of Life and Death (Yorkshire Sculpture Park, till 10 August)
Keep on questioning
Andrew Lambirth
One of the most tedious aspects of contemporary art writing is the critical pen- chant for the pigeon-hole. Why label artists `neo-conceptual' or 'ruralist'? To categorise is to dismiss: once a thing has been named, it can be forgotten. But the essence of art is to question, and to keep on questioning, not to forget. Quite rightly Maggi Ham- bling has long rejected the designation of `women's art'; she makes art of a wider rel- evance, art which challenges definitions. Her idea is to broaden the game, not nar- row it down. To this end, sensing that her work demanded an increasingly three- dimensional expression, Hambling has moved from being a painter to being a sculptor. Some commentators find this transition hard to accept (more label trou- `Conversation' 1996-97 (detail) by Maggi Hambling ble). What they fail to realise is that Ham- bling is really only extending the means available to her, trying another route to the same goal (the goal being to communicate something useful about the human condi- tion); she is still what she's always been, an artist of striking inventiveness.
The Bothy Gallery of the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, where her work is currently being shown, is an odd exhibition space. Long and narrow, it undulates up the hill on which it is built. One long wall is punc- tuated and propped up by metal stanchions which project into the gallery, the other is mostly windows. The light is thus good, but the space is effectively broken up into bays. Hambling has made good use of the idiosyncrasies of the place, and her work is shown to advantage: this is the best instal- lation of her sculpture so far. When the vis- itor enters the gallery at its lower end, your eyes are met with a throng of forms, a flick- ering forest rising before you. As you look up the length of the gallery, some 30 sculp- tures appear foreshortened, as if superim- posed and elided. The effect is at once magical and impressive. As you move fur- ther into the gallery, and in among the sculptures on their plinths, you realise that there is actually plenty of space around each exhibit. The bays are on different lev- els, and the show thus ascends from the earliest work of coffins doing unusual things, to the most recent and vividly opti- mistic masks. As the artist herself told me, the journey of the exhibition thus starts with death and ends with life.
The first exhibition of Hambling the sculptor in bronze was last year at Marlbor- ough Fine Art in London. It was amazing then to see how far she had come in the short time she had been working in wax and metal. Her practice, which she devel- oped as recently as 1993, is to draw with her finger in sand, then pour molten wax into the resulting indentations. This pro- cess is repeated several times as Hambling builds up a version of a thing seen from dif- ferent angles in overlapping planes. When the wax has set, these heavily textured pieces of, as it were, solid drawing are assembled into intricate and moving mod- els, and then east in bronze by the lost wax method. Because she uses this technique, each sculpture is a unique cast, for the wax model literally melts away. The distinctive uneven yet crisp edge to these sculptures arises directly from the way the wax is poured. After casting into bronze, some additional work may be done to burnish or dull the patina.
The sheer virtuosity of Hambling's use of line, of drawing space with bronze, initially presented innumerable engineering prob- lems in terms of how to make the things stand up. She seems to have resolved this almost intuitively, making sculptures which tilt and teeter, shivering in your presence like divining-rods. They appear fragile, tense. They are tough but not fully solid. Hambling aims for a kind of transparency. As she says, her sculpture 'leaves space for the human spirit to flow through, the inside and outside breathing together for a moment'.
In their attenuated lines, their scabrous and lacerated forms, these sculptures might suggest the imminence of disaster. Often the overt theme is death, but the mood is not despairing. Hambling makes coffins that dance and get erections, that emit stars, that celebrate rather than deny death. She is profoundly serious in her art but not lacking in humour. Her tripod fig- ures just balance, held in tension. Temples nearly topple. A line of repeated anony- mous heads springs from the floor and makes for the stars. The eminently recog- nisable heads of friends such as Andrew Logan and Max Wall offer a new take on portraiture, filled with quirky observation; Robert Medley wields a paint brush with typical and superb aplomb.
Every artist is most interested in his or her most recent work. The brouhaha that surrounds Hambling's latest commission (and first major public sculpture), a memo- rial tribute to Oscar Wilde, has obscured the elegance, economy and wit of her pro- posals. The latest work in her Yorkshire show has an equally blithe spirit. A whole group of small mask-like heads people the far walls of the Bothy Gallery. They have an archaic simplicity, which yet manages to express a depth of feeling absent in much contemporary sculpture. A multiple exhibit called 'Conversation' consists of 11 sepa- rate pieces — a frieze of heads to suggest a crowd. These masks, of different degrees of convexity, pay humorous tribute to the var- iousness of humanity. They also serve as an amusingly raucous riposte to those who would have her limit her creativity. Ham- bling the maverick remains delightfully uncategorisable.
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